Banned Nvidia H100 and H800 Servers Pledged as Collateral in Shanghai

Nineteen-three. That's how many servers a Shanghai data-center operator's subsidiary pledged as loan collateral in January 2025 — and, according to Chinese filings cited by Bloomberg News on Friday, 74 of them carried Nvidia chips the US bars from export to China: 22 Dell systems with H800s and 52 Super Micro machines fitted with H100 and H200 GPUs.

The filings put the hardware physically inside the Shanghai facility, tied to Megaspeed, a Singapore-based Nvidia cloud partner. Until now, links between that site and Megaspeed rested mostly on investor presentations and corporate brochures. The paper trail is firmer.

The subsidiary belongs to Shanghai Longteng, a company Alice Huang founded in 2015. Bloomberg reports she sold her shares in 2017, and her personal role in the server purchases has not been established. Reuters has reported that US authorities suspect her of intelligence ties to Beijing; Megaspeed denies illegally diverting Nvidia chips to China.

How did the servers reach Shanghai?

Through Singapore, apparently. Some of the systems were first sold to Aperia Cloud Services, a Singapore-based Nvidia Cloud Partner, before landing with the Shanghai company, a person familiar with the matter told Bloomberg.

Aperia bought the 22 Dell servers with H800 chips — silicon the US has barred from export to China since 2023. Dell's statement is blunt: it "halted all sales and support to Aperia International in February 2025 due to concerns about chip smuggling."

Nvidia says Aperia was no longer an active customer by the time Aperia's chief executive was arrested, and it has scrubbed Aperia from its public list of cloud partners. Aperia denies wrongdoing and didn't answer questions about the hardware or any connection to Alice Huang. In May 2025, Jensen Huang himself said there was no evidence Nvidia chips were being diverted.

What changed in Nvidia's Singapore numbers?

Fortune reported Thursday that Nvidia altered its Singapore revenue reporting last year, around the time it added Megaspeed to an internal block list in mid-2025, per Wall Street Journal reporting. Nvidia's filings confirm the shift — the numbers tell the story:

• Quarter ended July 27, 2025: $10.16 billion billed to Singapore, 22% of total revenue, up from $5.62 billion a year earlier
• Same filing: customers used Singapore "to centralize invoicing while our products are almost always shipped elsewhere"
• Same filing: more than 99% of controlled data-center compute revenue billed to Singapore came from US-based customers' orders
• Quarter ended Oct. 26, 2025: Nvidia switched to reporting by customer headquarters; Singapore vanished from the table, leaving only the United States, Taiwan, China and Other

On the billing basis, the US posted $23.47 billion and Taiwan $8.53 billion that July quarter. On the HQ basis, the US jumped to $39.18 billion and Taiwan to $13.75 billion in the October quarter, with China including Hong Kong at $2.97 billion of a $57.01 billion total.

Nvidia didn't answer Fortune's question about whether the change related to Megaspeed. Columbia Business School accounting professor Shiva Rajgopal told Fortune "the timing is curious," but said public information can't show what drove it.

How wide does this go?

The threads keep multiplying. Politico reported Thursday that Megaspeed has hired a US law firm as the scandal widens. The Information reported that companies linked to Alice Huang invested in Chinese AI developer DeepSeek. CNBC earlier tied her business network to a data center serving Huawei Cloud, and The Information reported that Jensen Huang's ties to her enabled more than $7 billion of chip sales to China — a figure tied to allegations, not findings. Megaspeed denies wrongdoing.

Jensen Huang resigned as Nvidia's CEO on Nov. 12, with CFO Colette Kress named interim chief. Nvidia's board says it has no reason to believe company secrets or US national security were compromised, and no public finding says Huang broke export-control laws.

What happens next turns on paperwork, not press releases: Chinese collateral filings, Singapore arrest records and whatever the new CEO discloses — or stops disclosing — about where Nvidia's chips actually land.